[Server-devel] physical security of the XS and XO-as-XS

[Bryan Berry]

I have been discussing these issues off-list w/ Greg Smith. I will
summarize some of our discussion and then reply to Sameer about physical
security for the XS and to the general suggestion that the XO can serve
as an XS. I have paraphrased Greg's question, don't blame him if I have
bastardized his phrasings. 

Here is the quick gist, 1) a lot of poor schools can gather the funds to
take care of the XS if shown the potential benefits and 2) IMHO using
the XO as XS is not a good idea.

Q: Are most of your target schools likely to have Internet and
money/power to have a server?

A: If the schools can afford to pay for the electricity to charge the
XO's, then they can easily afford a server.

Q: How did it go putting a server in schools and making sure they don't
get stolen?

A: This is true, it is hard to secure a server, but if a school can't
provide a secure place for the server then they can't secure their
copper electrical wiring, a wireless router, or any other kind
networking equipment. If the school can't afford electricity, then the
students who attend probably don't have electricity at home. Our
requirement for working w/ a school is that the school already has
electricity.

A hosted solution can work as long as their is a really consistent
Internet connection to the school. That can be hard in __a lot__ of
developing countries. Frankly, I think it is much, much easier to secure
the XS than provide a stable Internet connection to a remote school.

Q: Perhaps we should focus on the poorest countries. Therefore no
Internet and no server. The server can  actually still add value even
with no Internet but there is concern its hard to secure.

A: Easy. If the school can't keep their electrical wiring from getting
stolen, they can't keep the server safe. The copper in electrical wiring
is quite valuable as thieves could easily repurpose it for home wiring.

Q: What are some possible benefits to using a regular tower pc as XS?

Virtually every Dept of Ed will want to put much more content on the XS
than can fit on an XO. You can add external USB hard drives until it
becomes one big kludge. 

Additionally, I am convinced that school administrators would see the
XO-as-XS as a spare XO and distribute to kids who don't have XO's at
their school or take it home to their own child.

We can add a lot of value to the OLPC initiative through the XS, for
relatively low investment of time and effort, but only if the XS
hardware can be upgraded. The XO obviously can't be upgraded.

A few examples:
1) e-mail for the teachers hosted on the XS. This gives teachers a
bigger stake in OLPC deployments and in the making sure their Internet
connection stays up. BTW, gmail is waaaay too slow across a slow
Internet connection.
2) VoIP connection to the Dept of Ed., so the Dept of Ed can call the
school, and vice versa. A great incentive to the school and Dept to
maintain and fund that Internet connection. 
3) Offline wikipedia, moodle courses, local copies of indigenous art and
music resources, I could go on forever.

There are drawbacks to the PC-as-XS, most notably power. However, you
will have to to set up power backup anyways to maintain the Internet
connection.

There are some scenarios where an XS may not be feasible at all, but we
must have a baseline requirement here for an XO deployment: the majority
of the kids OR the school must have consistent electricity. Here in
Nepal our base requirement is that a pilot school must already have
electricity. 


-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org